Kindergarten

A new report on “next generation” assessment systems is stirring up some important questions about how assessment tools should be used to provide feedback to teachers and students.  The report also provides a tightened definition of the educational buzzword that refers to that feedback loop: “formative assessment.”

Note: The video above features the panel discussion titled, “Leveraging Public Dollars: How?” from the Before Birth & Up Through Third Grade Forum on March 2. Videos for the other two panel discussions can be found on the right side of this page.

As budget cuts continue to loom, policymakers may feel resigned to take a defensive, "let's just get through this" position, instead of moving forward on innovations. This would be a mistake. Early education has always suffered from a lack of resources to serve the full population and may be working with even less in the coming years, but that shouldn't stop the field from continuing to press for reform of the education system.

When more than two-thirds of students cannot read at grade level and barely three-quarters are graduating from high school on time, it is time to reevaluate not just how well our schools and teachers are doing but whether the entire system needs an overhaul. That is where we find ourselves today. Reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are embarrassingly low for all children and abysmal for minorities. Worse still, graduation rates, according to the National Center on Educational Statistics, are hovering around 60% in some states.

As researchers continue to highlight the role of early education programs in closing achievement gaps, school districts need examples of exactly how it's done. Red Bank Borough, a small district in New Jersey, is one such place -- and attendees at the National Ed Trust Conference earlier this month had a rare opportunity to hear from Laura Morana, Red Bank's superintendent, about how an integrated curriculum between pre-K and kindergarten set the stage for success.

It seems everyone is down on bad teachers these days. But the truth is that simply removing the bad apples won't fix our education problems. After all, it's not as if there's a large pool of superstar teachers waiting to replace those who are weeded out. Our best hope to improve education broadly and deeply is to strengthen the programs that develop and prepare the vast majority of the nation's teachers.

On November 5, 2010, Lisa Guernsey of the Early Education Initiative facilitated a panel on PreK-3^rd strategies at the National Ed Trust Conference in Arlington, Va.

Early mathematics and the concept of “executive function” should command more attention as researchers explore how children learn, according to Deborah J. Stipek, dean of Stanford University’s education school. Her remarks were part of a forum last month to mark the 10^th anniversary of the influential book, Neurons to Neighborhoods. 

It may take awhile to feel the full effect of the mid-term Congressional elections, but that didn’t stop several experts at an education forum in Washington, D.C. today from offering a bleak outlook on the chances for changes to one key education law: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Amid this fall’s high-pitched debates over education reform, the early grades of elementary school – those grades that don’t come with high-stakes statewide testing – are not getting much attention. So when a high-level Obama Administration official recently made the case for elementary school improvements in a public forum, we took note.